Envy 23 touchsmart All in one cannot boot - Black Screen

[Luc_Vienna]

I am telling this story because it could help others having the same / Similar problem.

My wife has a HP ENVY 23-d080eg TouchSmart All-in-One Desktop PC. She wanted me to upgrade it to windows 10 and put in an SSD and maybe more ram. It had 4gb of ram and a 1TB seagate harddisk.

So i got a 500gb samsung evo 870 and 16 gb of ram (ddr3 1600Mhz)

Installing the harddisk and the ram was easy so i continued installing windows 10.

I had some little driver problems (not recognizing the tv tuner and 2 other pci devices ) but it went quite well.
The HP homepage that finds your drivers said: "There are no drivers for your device" - because windows 10 is not supported! only windows 8.1 for this envy 23.

I finally found the the tv tuner and the 2 other devices were in the optional windows updates, so i clicked for them to update and I think THAT was my error.

Because it installs also some xenon whatever processor drivers... and thats where the problems started.

It booted a couple of times (i installed office and a graphics program,... but suddenly.. nada.. it stopped.

Nothing moving anymore... i did not even get into seeing the hp logo. no bios, nothing. dead.. just 1 led blinking once when i press the power button.. I spent 2 days reading.. and testing.

I reinstalled the old 4 gib ram and..... it booted... mahh i was happy.. but it only did it once... then.. no way!!! stopped again.

I think i did everything, from resetting, taking out the bios battery overnight, trying to reset the bios jumpers at least 100 times... nada... nothing helped. Then i read that one guy managed to get it working with a 2 gig ram brick... so i went to buy one (not easy to find these days - they all start at 4 gig but i had one of those allready)..

I finally found one 2 gig with only 1333 Mhz.. for 17€... AND.---- it worked!!!!!!!

Very strange... what i then did was the following:

I swapped the hard disks (put back the old one with windows 8.1 --- i had tried that before but didnt do any good)
I then got the newest bios with the windows 8,1 installer and put the files onto a thumbdrive'

As I said, after installing the 2gigs of ram ... it booted.. !!!! in windows 8.1

i then updated the bios.... and then replaced the ram and the harddisk again.-.. and guess what.. it now runs increadibly fast ---(full boot in less than 15 seconds) the 16 gigs of 1600 ram are recognized as well as the samsung ssd.

I was afraid of having to flash the bios with an rasperrry pi (seems to have worked for several people) but i have never ever used one of them. Also that would have been an expensive operation ... as i would have had to buy all the equipment.. the ram was 17€.
I was wondering why the bios got corrupted in first place-.-- and why it would work with a 2Gig of ram stick. I can only think of some driver installed (when i installed ALL the optional drivers) just took a small bite and corrupted something like the last line of the bios. with the 2 gigs it would not even call the corrupted routine.. (thats just a thought)

I am sharing this, because maybe someone is in the same situation and can find it usefull

Cheers

Luc

PS: Forgot: when it updated the bios under windows 8.1 (i ran the update .bat) it first erased the eprom, then wrote it and verified it.. everything ok... but then... it gave me and error in red (in the dos window) something like cannot find ME driver....
but it does not seem to interfere with anything because i now run windows 10, 20H2 build 19042.1151
And since yesterday I had NO more issues. (knock on wood)

I did though disable the harddisk power managment in the bios.

[MarcusC]

Hey @Luc_Vienna 🙂

Thank you for visiting our community, we are glad that you have resolved the issue you were experiencing on your device. 😊



In this case, we thank you for sharing the solution, so that you can help other users who are experiencing the same problem.



Please, reach out if we can help you with anything else.

Regards,

MarcusC

[Luc_Vienna]

Hey MarcusC
This community is great, thats where i found the little pieces to assemble for the solution that worked for me.

what would be interesting is to know what solution hp suggests for flashing a bios on a machine like mine, without using a rasperry pi or arduino.
thats not what a typical user wants to do. because now i have windows 10 installed, i would not know how to flash it again.

(ok i still have the 8.1 disk) but, if i hadn't... there would not be an easy way, because the flashing program does not run under windows 10.
it would be great if there were a universal flashing program that works under all operating systems.

Luc